News and Guides - My Green Corner » 2008 » December

The big players on web are experiencing during these days their best profit days of the year. The travel industry represented by sites like Booking, Venere or Planigo  are selling a lot of tours, people buy a lot of gifts on ebay, gifts.com or other big webstores, product review sites like consumersearch.com are also eating a big piece of pie and forums and other communities are as crowded as ever.

Many webmasters find worthwhile to big sites having in mind only this period of year. This so called season sites are grouped around specific holidays like Christmas, Easter, Halloween, Women’s day, Lover’s day and many others.  Webmasters invest during the year for a chuck of profit split on 2-3 days of selling. Of course, like all good businesses, it all dependes on the volume, but it is trivial that businesses with good history will do better each year goes by.

Personally, I find this type of practice risky for newbies, including me. Especially if you are targeting strong keywords. It is kind of hard to invest a hole year in a site that will see the light of incomefor such a short time, but I am confident that a hand of people are making good money on this. Well, for those of you, my respect guys. For me and the rest, we are waiting for January. A lot.

Happy holidays!

Yesterday, as I was watching news, I saw a brief interview on our national television with our president. He was recommending some crisis measures to all the people from our country. As much as I know that a president has limited powers, compared with the attributions of Parliament or Government, I feel that people will make more “national” choices in 2009. As the crisis will rise the unemployed rate, more and more protective measures will be taken by politicians in order to protect their people.

As I was watching the video, I had this crazy idea. Please note this is only an assumption made by me at 2 a.m. in the morning; I may not have though straight. My idea is that eventually the US government will adopt an intervention politic related to the search engine results for important queries. There are many issues that are spinning around the honesty of companies like Google Inc. Some even argue the fact that this company is under government control since long ago and researchers showed that for some popular queries, the results are sorted in an empiric way. Even so, it is trivial that search engines offer the best legit results on most queries. But with the prospect of economical decline in mind, I must say that the US government may be capable of influncing private companies to watch for its own interest. Let us not forget the acquisition on AEG, which was about to go bankrupt a few months ago. Even if that is not the case with Google or Yahoo, governments have other means and tools which they use to impose their point of view. If that will be the case, the hit will be taken by foreign publishers and web marketers. 

I really hope things to turn out well for all of you. I wish you all a great day and Happy Holidays!

Until next time, yours truly,
Dugu

There are a lot of rumors going on these days. People are talking about one of the worst periods of our lives, period that will come in the following years. The rumors are becoming reality. The crisis is already started in US and in several countries in UE. For example, in my hometown, several factories have been closed. Some of them were opened for over 15 years. Many people that worked there and have loans now find themselves in impossibility to pay the rates and loose their homes. Things are starting to go very bad for small investitures as well. These people were relying their business on big players. If big companies go down, they will take with them some of the small activities that were being performed around them and some people will loose here.

The overpriced real-estate market is in the air as well. In my hometown, a flat with 2 rooms was around $100000 when the crisis started.  This price is way too much, in rapport with the medium salary from our country which is $350. In Bucharest, prices were even higher. The same flat could be bought in Vienna for $80000. There is no logic in that, is it? Now real estate investors are loosing big time, as prices are falling like a rock.   

The web industry is sensing the crisis as well. People have less money for advertising. It’s obvious that big PPC programs like Adsense will try to improve their profit because they will make less money. These will reflect in the profit of small webmasters. The internet will not be as accessible as it was. The land of all opportunities is now closing its virtual gates. 

All the countries should now protect their people and adopt some protective measures, at least during these years. New business should be encouraged, especially the ones that will activate on the web, because the internet is the answer to low cost advertising and mass information needs of humanity.

Wishing you all good luck…

Dugu   

3 days ago, in Romania, the elections for a new parliament were held. My father was a candidate for a mandate for the Chamber of deputies, but unfortunately, the democrats lost in our town and he came the second.

I was really involved in his campaign. I must say the Romanians don’t take serious the voting process. Most of them come uninformed at the voting sections and stamp anyone which has a good pronounceable name. There is a lot of fraud, a lot of votes are sold for a few bucks, or are lost during the counting process. Young people don’t come to vote because they lost their trust in our political class.  These are just o few of the problems that I got in contact with; there are many other variables one must take into account when involving into planning and marketing a political campaign.

The heavily advertised political formation PDL came first. I my opinion, with the economical crisis on the horizon, people choose wrong.  I am confident that after 4 years people will see their mistake and choose the right path for our country, a country where over 70% of population struggling at the limit of poverty and on the other hand, the richest 300 people hold over 25% of our PIB. Our elders have miserable pensions; our fresh graduates live our country for a better chance in vest European countries; our farmers are unprotected from natural disasters like flooding or drought; our big companies were sold to foreign players for pennies. After 4 years, our country is doing worse than it was, but people still don’t see this. I am confident our belief will change with time and I hope that the ones responsible for the things above will be brought to justice.
Have a great day.